Future of Firefox Australis and LinuxMint

[isaach]

I really don't think this is a huge deal. I upgraded via the Firefox Next PPA expecting to be horrified, but meh. It's noticeably snappier, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Chrome handburger menu being unremovable is annoying. As is the bookmark star being removed from the location bar and being permanently paired with a bookmark menu icon. don't really care about the shape of the tabs.

But thankfully the menu bar can still be shown, so this isn't really a dumbing down at all (though if you used the single Firefox menu in the upper-left instead of the menu bar you'll not doubt disagree).

[isaach]

Okay, I installed Classic Theme Restorer. Love it, especially since it lets you configure how much of the classic theme you want back. It's worth it IMO for the ability to remove the Chrome-esque menu icon alone.

There's really no need for Mint to go to a forked Firefox version. Just have Classic Theme Restorer installed by default if you have to do anything.

[DaComboMan]

What i dodn't know, this was Mozilla's interface idea before Chrome came out!
Suppose they hesitated for a long time, especially after Chrome's rise to popularity.

[kmb42vt]

I really don't think this is a huge deal. I upgraded via the Firefox Next PPA expecting to be horrified, but meh. It's noticeably snappier, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Chrome handburger menu being unremovable is annoying. As is the bookmark star being removed from the location bar and being permanently paired with a bookmark menu icon. don't really care about the shape of the tabs.

But thankfully the menu bar can still be shown, so this isn't really a dumbing down at all (though if you used the single Firefox menu in the upper-left instead of the menu bar you'll not doubt disagree).

Just so you know, you can remove what you called "the handburger menu" by right-clicking it and clicking on "Customize". From there you can drag it to the unused icons field.

[isaach]

Hmm. That didn't work for me when I tried it before adding the Classic Theme Restorer (the "hamburger" menu was outside of the field of movable icons). Of course that could be due to weirdness resulting from using FF29 with a pre-existing profile (a very long-serving profile actually).

[kmb42vt]

In one of my previous comments I stated that the Classic Theme Restorer with the "Statusbar on Add-ons bar" preference checked that the "NoSquint" extension's icon would show up again on the restored Add-on" bar. This has since stopped working probably because it was a fluke that it worked in the first place since NoSquint hasn't been updated for year (literally at the time of this comment). However, it still functions correctly. So instead of accessing it's options via the Add-on bar's NoSquint icon, I have to right-click on any blank space on a given web page and "NoSquint settings" is at the bottom of the menu.

Update 4/29/14: Things have change quite a bit since since I posted this comment. Firefox 29 has gone from beta 6 to beta 9 and the development build of the Classic Theme Restorer (CTR) extension has gone through a rather major rewrite (options have changed as well as the look of the thing). For example, the "NoSquint" extension's icon is back on the CTR Add-on bar and works correctly again. I don't expect the final version of CTR will be released until after Firefox 29 reaches final and there seems to be quite a lot of code changes going on for Firefox 29 even now. Not so much for Australis but rather the "under the hood" code. Beta 9 is even a bit faster than beta 6 was.

[isaach]

Just tried it on a clean profile. The menu icon isn't movable. As you can see from the attachments, it's outside of the perforated box encompassing the movable icons. I included both with and without the menu bar because older Firefox versions would automatically hide the Firefox Menu icon when the menu bar was shown. When I try to grab it it kicks me out of the Customize view. 29.0~b6+build1-0ubuntu0.12.10.1 on Nadia FYI.

Classic Theme Restorer does make it movable though.

[kmb42vt]

Hmm. That didn't work for me when I tried it before adding the Classic Theme Restorer (the "hamburger" menu was outside of the field of movable icons). Of course that could be due to weirdness resulting from using FF29 with a pre-existing profile (a very long-serving profile actually).

Ah, it's the Classic Theme Restorer extension that must allow the hamburger menu to be removed then? I'm also using a rather ancient Fireofx profile that I've hauled around with me from distro to distro but I actually backed up all it's data using the FEBE extension and rebuilt it about 4 months ago. Got rid of a whole lot of leftover extension configurations in "about:config" that way.

[isaach]

Hey. FEBE is pretty cool. I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks.

[3mutts]

Some good news about this update:

Most Addons still work with it
Mozilla didn't get rid of custom themes (some are updated for Firefox 29)
Addons Bar is gone but it isn't a huge deal for me
Cant say anything about the new sync as I haven't tried it

[BlackVeils]

I don't have a problem with the changes, unless it really does cause long term issue for add-ons. everything looks to be customisable.

does it still load web pages slowly (websites, I am not referring to the general GUI) ? as I find web browsers load pages fast, except for Firefox, on different computers with different setups.

[RacerBG]

It's not so bad after all. I'm eager to try the final version but one thing is sure - I will remain FF hardcore user!

[DaComboMan]

What Mozilla did is like Unity for Ubuntu.
It just stinks!

Firefox was always so flexible, now it is becoming more rigid.

If people are happy with speed improvements, so be it.
Maxthon 4 is the fastest at present time but i'm not going there (yet!) 'cause they ain't got good compatible extensions like Firefox has.

Firefox Asstralis is just like having to re-register your Microsoft Office (even if you paid for it, you still have to register and register after multiple installations etc.).
Who needs to click on exit in their browser after doing modifications except for... Firefox Asstralis?!

[xenopeek]

Ghacks collected what other areas of Firefox might get a design overhaul in future releases: http://www.ghacks.net/2014/04/20/firefo ... -may-next/

Looks dashingly exciting to me, so I'll probably be one of the users happy with the change (after configuring it for my needs, like I've done with every Firefox release). If you're not one of the users happy with the change, looks like the classic theme restorer add-on will help you out.

[DaComboMan]

Classic restorer is in beta phase right now and quite glitchy.

Compatibility issues with extensions among themselves too.

My hunch is we'll be in transition time for a few months before all extensions are (wishfully) compatible.
Not so sure about complete themes section though.
Quite a few of these no longer work with present stable 28 so go figure how many more we'll lose when 29 comes out.

[isaach]

Ghacks collected what other areas of Firefox might get a design overhaul in future releases: http://www.ghacks.net/2014/04/20/firefo ... -may-next/

Looks dashingly exciting to me, so I'll probably be one of the users happy with the change (after configuring it for my needs, like I've done with every Firefox release). If you're not one of the users happy with the change, looks like the classic theme restorer add-on will help you out.

The Classic Theme Restorer is also good for people who mostly like Australis since in addition to giving you the ability to roll back the changes, it also makes Australis highly configurable. Great for tweaking!

[xenopeek]

I usually stick to default themes, my changes are mostly to behavior and indeed add-ons and extensions. If you see no better options, you could either lock your current Firefox version for a while or downgrade to Firefox ESR (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/o ... tions/faq/). Looks like till October this year you can use the ESR, which is based on Firefox 24. Unlike locking your current Firefox version, the ESR gets security fixes backported from newer Firefox release.

To lock your current Firefox version
First check which Firefox packages you have installed. Check with:

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dpkg -l | grep firefox

Then for each package called firefox or firefox-something, run this command (the example is for the firefox package; replace "firefox" with firefox-something for each other package):

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echo firefox hold | sudo dpkg --set-selections

If you at a later moment want to install the newer version of Firefox, remove the hold. Run the same commands but replace the word "hold" with the word "install". Then open Update Manager, click Refresh, and the newest version of Firefox will become available for installation again.

To downgrade to the ESR version
I strongly recommend you backup your Firefox profile before you start this! Because you are currently running a newer Firefox version than ESR, you might have some problems when loading your current Firefox profile in ESR (possibly damaging it). Hence make a backup of your profile first, before you do anything else. You can do so with this command:

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cp ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/.mozilla/firefox.old

Here's an article how to install it: http://www.tuxgarage.com/2012/02/instal ... linux.html. Looks like that will work, though you will have to change steps 1 and 2 to account for newer ESR version available than used in that article.

Replace step 1 with: download a file from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/24.4.0esr/. First go to linux-i686 for 32-bit or linux-x86_64 for 64-bit. Then click on the language you want Firefox to be in, and then download the file there.

Replace step 2 with: open a terminal on the folder where you downloaded the file. Run the command

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ls

to confirm the file is there and you are in the right place. Then run the command:

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sudo tar -xvjf firefox-24.4.0esr.tar.bz2 -C /opt

Then proceed with step 3 and 4.

[kmb42vt]

I don't have a problem with the changes, unless it really does cause long term issue for add-ons. everything looks to be customisable.

does it still load web pages slowly (websites, I am not referring to the general GUI) ? as I find web browsers load pages fast, except for Firefox, on different computers with different setups.

To be truthful about it, I've n ever really had a problem with Firefox loading pages slower than other web browsers and I've been using Firefox since around version 2.0. That's only my personal experience though and I tend to keep the number of extensions I have installed as low as possible and I always check to see if these extensions are still in development/compatible with my version of Firefox. And if I remove an extension from Firefox I always go into "about:config" and manually remove that particular extension's preferences if they've been left behind.

So just for information sake, what I have found throughout the years is that web page slow downs in Firefox are always caused by the following:

Too many Add-ons (meaning "extensions") installed and/or using extensions that have long been out of development which can cause all sorts of problems. There are actually folks out there who have 30 or more extensions installed (I've personally helped someone who had nearly 100 installed) and then wonder why Firefox has so many problems (rendering problems, slow page load, etc).

A corrupt Firefox profile often caused by the above. Often times just removing an extension still leaves all it's preferences in "about:config" which have to be weeded out manually. Extension developers should be required to have an option to remove all of an extension's preferences upon removal of the extension itself but unfortunately, there isn't such a requirement and these "leftovers" can eventually cause problems which is, of course, blamed on the browser itself.

And yes, there can be a "severe" bug in a new release of Firefox that causes problems especially on certain hardware configurations but thankfully these are very few and far between.

Just sayin'.

[DaComboMan]

The easiest way for a corrupt profile is simply create a new one no?

The way i look the present venue Mozilla has taken with Firefox 29 + is like Windows 8 (a total flop!).

I've opted for Palemoon in Windows and when LinuxMint 17 comes out, either i go with Palemoon or ESR.




Mozilla! You're not getting a dime out of me until you stop these shenanigans !!!

[Adelante]

I'm happy with 29. It's resolved a scrolling snag I've run into the past few releases, on and off, but particularly this year. It's scrolling smoothly now, so that's good.